I'm going to start on a huge project soon. I'm a little lost on how to get started. I'm hoping someone here (awesome forums by the way) can lend me a hand, be it robotic or otherwise.

I'm going to make a robotic head. It will have all of the facial movements of a human, as well as, rotation of the neck. I'm really not too worried about this part.

I am trying to figure out what I need for the brain and the controllers. I will write the code in Python (or maybe a slight variation of it, depending on what I come across). It should be very processor heavy. It will have a ton of features that will take me a long time to make. Some of these features include, voice and facial recognition, and speaking through "text to speak". I will most likely have to build my own phoneme generator and use that to control the facial features. The moving parts in the face will include: 3 vertical sliders for each eyebrow, possibly one vertical slider for the forehead, one for each cheeks, 4 vertical and horizontal sliders for each lip (top and bottom), and a jawbone. (This is not final, but I think I covered my bases.)

This may not sound like much (probably because I'm being very vague about it), but there will be a lot of work on the programming side of it.

I'm trying to devise a way for better AI interaction. The input that the bot receives will be filtered through a grammar system in a way that it can dissect a sentence and have, a somewhat, intelligent feedback. Although this is sort of an ultimate goal, it is not priority. I do however like to think ahead and I will need the capacity and power.

Also, does anyone know of a way of doing/testing robots in a virtual or simulated manner? I would rather test on the computer as much as possible, I think it would be a lot cleaner and easier to debug.

Thanks for the link. That's pretty much what I'm going to attempt. The problem I'm having seems like the same problem he is having. He mentioned that he doesn't have the necessary computing power to compute the information of the robots surroundings.

I'm wondering if I could just get a laptop or a pc. I really don't know much about the hardware aspect. Micro controllers and servos are kind of a new thing to me. I think if I can get a leg up on what will be needed, that will help me greatly in the future.